Wise Turtle Publishing

Happy Inktober! I've been doodling bits and bobs for hand-drawn OVA character sheets for the campaign I'm about to run. I've also been working (for a million years!) on a bestiary of sorts to use in that kind of game. Up until now I've just had them scribbled on 3x5 cards (though I'm slowly transcribing them all to a digital format) but I decided to make something fun for them for this next game!

I really wanted some feedback on these first before I do a full character sheet.



This should be the front and back for a monster or NPC card. It's designed to fit four to a sheet of 8.5x11 paper. (Alternately, you could just keep them on the same side of a half sheet of paper, which you could put in one of those half-sized binders. I really like those, too.)

I want to put monster info on them and laminate them so I can write on them with a dry-erase marker, I think. Any excuse to use my laminator.

Space for a little illustration and notes/info up top (plus Threat Value! very important) and Abilities/Weaknesses at the bottom. The back side has all the combat stats and room for four attacks. In addition to the Health, Endurance, Defense, and Threat Value that the sample characters in the book have, I also made spots for the base DX and Attack roll, as well as Initiative.

I've gotta run to my Friday Rolemaster game so I'll show off the fully finished cards when I get back!

I almost forgot -- I messed up the measurements in that first image and made them about a 1/2 inch too short. The final ones are fixed, and the attack spacing is way less wonky.

Quick pic:

This looks very nice! Great job.

In the end.... I forgot to label the Abilities/Weaknesses section. ;_; I'll probably just write it on there before I make copies haha.

(Full size.)

So... there's a spot for all your combat stats, including initiative roll. You add up all that stuff (minus initiative) to find your TV, so that's pretty convenient? The little heart and sweatdrop are just for decoration but I guess you could put the bonus from Abilities/Weaknesses in there too if you wanted.

Notes... definitely put Armor and Resistance/Vulnerability in here.

The Items section is something I needed for my own OVA game. The blocky bits are for Gear Abilities, and you can put other stuff on the lines below that. And your money in the gold coin!

The Abilities/Weaknesses section is customized for my game, too. Underneath every Ability, there's 15 dots -- those are for experience points. A +1 Ability costs 1, +2 costs 2, +3 costs 4, etc. The same as the scaled costs in the book. For Weaknesses, I decided it would cost 5 points to buy down a point of a Weakness.

Lemme know what you think!

You have done some beautiful work with this stuff.

I can't tell you how much I love these sheets! The iconography for everything is brilliant—from the ! TV to the sweatdrop Endurance to the die-shaped Roll. I know this is geared towards your fantasy campaign, but the chubby little stars and hearts make me want to abscond with it for some magical girl hijinx.

Thanks for sharing!

Clay wrote:I can't tell you how much I love these sheets! The iconography for everything is brilliant—from the ! TV to the sweatdrop Endurance to the die-shaped Roll. I know this is geared towards your fantasy campaign, but the chubby little stars and hearts make me want to abscond with it for some magical girl hijinx.

Thanks for sharing!

Everything is better with magical girls, Clay. Everything.

This was a lot of fun. I have two or three sketchbook pages of little icons and stuff that I doodled all separately before I put them together in a sheet. It counted for Inktober because I did it all in pen, ha.

ALSO. My stars are chubby and round because I've tried for years to practice making them even and I've never been able to, so I started drawing them using circles as guidelines.

For Reasons, all my images are gone, but all of this stuff can be found on my tumblr blog (link).

As for new stuff, though! Recently I have fallen in love with dry-erase markers on laminated paper so I made little status cards to track characters in combat! I also want to get back into the habit of rewarding my players with free drama dice, so I made some cards to pass out during gameplay! (Characters with the Lucky Ability start each adventure with some free ones.)

I don't like having no images of the previous stuff but here's the new stuff anyway:

New character sheet --


New mini sheet --

As a GM, it’s important to remember that NPCs – particularly ones the players are only ever going to see in combat – don’t have to be fully worked out. Their stats don’t have to be justified with Abilities and Weaknesses.

My previous NPC sheets had a big section for Abilities and Weaknesses. That’s fine for important characters with custom stats, or player-generated content like Companions or Vehicles. However, when making things like monsters just for combat, I found myself getting bogged down in details that were never really relevant anyway! So I’m giving this a try now: just combat stat blocks with room for some notes. We’ll see how it goes!

Full stats for attacks aren't really necessary, either, since I have a small list of standard ones I use for most enemies. (Think: Pokemon moves. Actually a large chunk of attacks -- and enemies in general, for this campaign -- are ones I nabbed from Final Fantasy Tactics, haha.) I've played with the idea of reference cards for these attacks, too...

Here's a quick mockup. The idea would be that I'd have a perk/flaw in each of those slots, and the pips next to them would represent its endurance value (one pip for +/-5 end.) Not really necessary on a finished attack I know, but. I always find myself adding them up in my head going, "is that right?" also kind of a visual for how complex an attack is. Points of Effective and Accurate (or Ineffective/Inaccurate) can just go on the pips next to Attack roll/DX. (The ones next to Endurance could be used to track Ammo, Buildup, whatever.) If I did something like this, I'd print up ones with different numbers of slots. I know I could put each attack in digitally before I print, but it's nice to have some blank ones to fill out during the game or during prep and also I have to go to Staples to print things so. :')

The dry-erase cards are gorgeous! So charming (and the flip-side drama die indicator is also really clever.) If I ever make a magical girl game, I'm going to have to get in touch!

BTW, did you get locked out of your old account? I could reset your password if you're not feeling True Blue after all.

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